In the recent environment for portable communication devices, technologies to provide personalized information services such as news recommendation and customized advertisement have been developed. In order to provide such personalized information service, it is necessary to obtain interests of a user.
A commonly used method of obtaining interests of a user relates to receiving a direct input from the user. For example, interests of a user may be acquired through a GUI providing the user with topics of interest list, or by letting the user directly specify his/her own words.
However, the conventional method has problems including that it is difficult to obtain interests of a user if the user does not actively respond to the UI in inconvenient environments to input information such as a portable communication device.
One way to automatically obtain interests of a user is automatically extracting search keywords of the user through a software installed on the user's device and regarding the extracted keywords as the interests of the user.
However, since this kind of conventional methods transmit all the search keywords of the user to a server, security concerns may be raised during the transmission. Furthermore, since these conventional technologies mainly target only at the search keywords of the user, their scope and targets of extraction in obtaining interests of the user are limited.